"You are positive" – how our editor experienced her vaccination breakthrough

The fifth wave caught up with my family and me, despite vaccination. A personal report from Katja Fischer De Santi about isolation, chills and over-salted soup.

When I first read the mail, I didn't understand a word. My brain couldn't or didn't want to understand what was written there. Especially as it was in English: "The result of your SARS CoV-2 PCR-test is POSITIVE for SARS CoV-2." I've been vaccinated twice, and I feel very comfortable, so comfortable that I was sitting in a restaurant when I read this.

We’ve been writing about this virus for over a year and a half, and I could even draw it in my sleep and can explain its effects on the body in English. And now it's in my body. I looked at the other people at the table, put my phone down on the table with the test result. They all understood immediately, and someone ordered a round of spirts: "A toast to the fact that we’re all vaccinated." I put on my mask and went outside. I would have liked to smoke a cigarette, but I didn't - the lungs and Covid, you know.

Healthy, but infected children at home
Once before, my brain didn't want to understand a text when I read it for the first time. That was three days earlier, when a cryptic text message arrived with a beep. “With regard to  person born: ? with initials B.D. ... in the subsequent individual analysis of the provisional pattern, the sample was positive." B.D is my ten-year-old son, he takes part in his school's repetitive Pool tests. My husband immediately picked him up from school; when he saw his father standing at the school door, he had to fight back his tears. He’s been at home since then - and with him the virus. Every time he coughs, we wince.

We did not want to, and couldn’t completely isolate our symptom-free son - our house is too open and too small, the little brother too clingy, and we are still reasonably young, healthy and vaccinated, we thought. The children had to be immediately quarantined for ten days – while the vaccinated adults were still allowed to go outdoors, and were allowed to meet who and where we wanted. That didn't seem quite right to us. The fact that the vaccination protection decreases after five months – which is exactly how long it has been since my second vaccination – and that, for weeks, we have been writing reports that even vaccinated people can become infected. According to a study published in October in "The Lancet", the protection against infection with the Pfizer vaccine drops from an initial 88% to 47% five months after vaccination. That's why I took a PCR test on Friday, out of curiosity and self-responsibility.

The quiet days become sick days
Contact Tracing contacts you promptly the next day. I conscientiously stated all my contacts of the last two days. And prepared myself for ten contactless, but intensive family days. But Corona still had a few unpleasant surprises in store for me. The first one caught me on Sunday evening. At first I just found it cool in the house, and put on a thick sweater, but then I really felt freezing cold. A little later I was lying on the sofa shivering, with two blankets on me. The fever came and went, rose to 39 °C, and was then gone an hour later. I didn't take any medication. I was hoping that my memory cells would remember the enemy quickly enough and unleash the corresponding antigen-antibody complexes on him.

Once a child has to stay at home with the virus, it will be difficult for parents to avoid infection. Especially as the vaccination was already a few months ago
Symbol image: Westend61

It reassures me to know that, even after five months, the vaccination still protects over 90% of people under the age of 65 from the risk of hospitalisation. The symptoms of the disease usually last a few days. This seemed to be the case for me, until I make myself a ginger tea, a really spicy one with lemon in it. When I took a sip, however, I thought I had forgotten the tea bag. But I hadn’t – I couldn’t taste anything on my tongue anymore, I couldn’t smell anything in my nose anymore.

Smoke in the kitchen and no sense of smell
In the next few days, I managed to regularly burn food without noticing it, or only when I saw the smoke rising in the kitchen. I couldn't smell anything while steaming onions, but still had tears in my eyes. I was not sure which was the clean and which the dirty laundry, because the smell test doesn’t help anymore, and I had to ask my children whether the soup was already salted. They find it funny, but I’ll only appreciate the joke if it goes away soon.

What should also soon go away is my lack of concentration: I’m constantly forgetting what I wanted to do, am constantly looking for something; it takes me an age to write an e-mail, and then I forget to send it. All this is not too bad, and we can laugh about it – but it is also a bit scary, I feel as though I’ve suddenly aged by decades.

Crime series to combat this pressure on the chest
But I only really become worried when I'm lying on the sofa in the evening and there’s suddenly this pressure on my chest. I feel the need to breathe very deeply, again and again. Am I imagining that right now? Because I know that the virus attacks the lungs? That low oxygen levels are typical? I try to suppress the thoughts; start watching some exciting crime series. Because this feeling now comes every evening.

My husband also cannot protect himself from the virus, and his test is also positive a few days later. He has long had the same symptoms as me. He has also had headaches for some days. The children remain healthy, and are enjoying their quarantine as an early Christmas holiday.

We’ve never before started making gifts so early, and rarely have I lost so catastrophically playing Memory against my eight-year-old. At some point he asks me pitifully:

"Will you will soon be back to normal in your nose and brain?"

I hope so, I say, trying not to think about the article I just read, which claimed that researchers from the University of Oxford had said that the vaccination protects well against severe courses of the infection, "but, in view of the many breakthrough infections, the lack of vaccination protection against long Covid symptoms is worrying". Meanwhile, I'm biting into an apple, which could just as well be a pear.